Deepak Malghan, faculty at the Centre for Public Policy, IIM Bangalore, has won the Dr VKRV Rao Award in Social Sciences, in the Human Geography and Ecology category, for the year 2015.
“Malghan’s scale framework sheds light on one of the central theoretical problems in ecological economies — the mapping between stocks and funds. His scale framework provides an analytically elegant mapping between the information-rich fund space and the cardinal stock space in a manner that is useful for conservation biology and policy,” the citation said.
The main objective of the award is to encourage young social scientists to undertake original research and to recognise the contributions made by them to the development of knowledge.
The award, by the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, is conferred on the recommendation of juries comprising experts, as an expression of high esteem.
Malghan is a faculty member in Public Policy at IIM Bangalore. He is an ecological economist recognised for his contribution to the development of a general theory of scale. His theoretical work has paved the way for ecological economists and conservations biologists to attempt an analytically consistent characterisation of the physical size of the economy relative to the ecosystem that contains and sustains it.
He is an eclectic scholar whose work spans several disciplines. He has made original contributions to disparate areas that lie outside the pale of theoretical ecological economies. His work engages with ecological political economy and human geography most broadly conceived. His writings cover topics ranging from social hydrology to historical political economy of interwar South Asia to intellectual history.